Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris accused the Memphis Safe Task Force of unlawful stops and racial profiling on Tuesday.
Harris held a press briefing to discuss the Memphis Safe Task Force arrests since the start of its third week of enforcement and the growing concerns the Memphis Hispanic community has regarding the task force.
He said members of the Hispanic community are being targeted, regardless of their legal status.
Immigrant Justice Program Director, Colton Bane, of Community Legal Center’s Immigrant Justice Program said he’s representing several clients who were racially profiled and arrested, despite their legal status.
Bane says there have been reports of law enforcement not returning licenses to Hispanic drivers after traffic stops.
“Not only are they racially profiling and pulling over Hispanic drivers with no cause, they’re then also creating future legal problems for these individuals,” said Bane.
Memphis Safe Task Force
Dipshit totalitarians’ gift for unintended irony is a really durable bit throughout history
“We support lawful activities, but as you know and heard me say before, we believe that the deployment of the National Guard is unconstitutional. At the same time, racial profiling is unconstitutional,” said Mayor Harris.
On Monday, the Supreme Court issued a brief, unsigned order that overturns those decisions. This gives immigration agents a “green light” to once again stop anyone they guess to be here illegally—even if a central reason for the stop was race. This endorses ICE and Border Patrol targeting any Latinos they observe in Los Angeles speaking Spanish or working in low-income jobs, and then demanding their papers.
Not that I expect this to change their behavior, but just to clarify, Memphis is under a full federal occupation (so not just ICE and BP). These aren’t just immigration agents. There are about 20 different federal and state agencies (including the TN department of wildlife of federal departments like Health and Human Services??) who are in Memphis. The full list is insane but I will link it here if you’re interested.
They have apparently been given access to TN highway patrol cars and often there will be caravans of unmarked cars that ride along with the highway patrol cars and make these stops. I’m assuming this is so that whatever you pull people over for, there will be multiple departments there to figure out something you can arrest or ticket the person for.
Unrelated to immigration, they’ve even targeted and arrested people on bicycles for things like not signaling properly to make a pretextual stop.
When asked about immigrant families living in fear, afraid to go to work or school due to the presence of ICE agents, the governor says he wants every Memphian to know the goal is to remove crime from the streets.
"If they’re not a criminal element, then they shouldn’t be afraid. That’s the goal of what we’re doing here,” Gov. Lee said.
Of course, nothing to hide, nothing to fear. What could possibly happen if you haven’t broken the law?
Bane said his client gave the trooper and a Homeland Security agent his ID, work permit, and social security card, but they refused to return his state-issued ID to him.
However, when Bane arrived at the scene to help his client, the trooper and the agent ended up returning the client’s ID to him.
Ok, so as long as you’re not breaking the law, and you have your personal lawyer on speed dial to come down to the scene and retrieve your ID for you every time you’re profiled and pulled over by federal agents who are constantly following you around and harassing you. Then you have nothing to worry about.
i wonder why the task force would refuse to give IDs and documentation back to immigrants when they know how likely it is they will be pulled over again in the very near future?
Almost like they’re lawless corrupt pieces of shit terrorizing America on behalf of the federal government. But that wouldn’t make sense. They’re only there to keep the city “safe.”
So that when you get pulled over again and you cannot identify Yourself, they get to put you in a Prison with no name.
Was racial profiling and unlawful stops not the primary objective of the task force? I don’t know how they could accomplish anything else given their racist, constitution-free activities so far.
